


Reacquaintance

by telm_393



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Binge Drinking, Brother-Sister Relationships, Complicated Relationships, Gen, Hopeful Ending, Mental Health Issues, No Apocalypse (Umbrella Academy)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-20
Updated: 2019-05-20
Packaged: 2020-02-10 00:42:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,214
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18649441
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/telm_393/pseuds/telm_393
Summary: The Hargreeves siblings close the “apocalypse” chapter of their lives. Five moves in with Vanya and struggles to adjust. Vanya doesn't know what to do, so she just does her best.





	Reacquaintance

**Author's Note:**

  * For [harping](https://archiveofourown.org/users/harping/gifts).



> Thank you to within_a_dream for alpha+beta reading!

“How’s your little madman in the attic, Vanya?” Klaus asks when Vanya runs into him at Ronald’s, the diner they’ve all gotten in the habit of frequenting now that Griddy’s is closed, because of course she runs into Klaus.

Sometimes it’s like Klaus is everywhere, always buzzing around in an attempt to keep himself busy and sober, clinging to his siblings because, surprise, surprise, it turns out that he doesn’t have any friends who aren’t relapse factories.

“Don’t call him that,” she mutters as she slides into the booth and gives the waitress an awkward smile. After three hours of rehearsal, she’s starving, and she doesn’t feel like going home yet, though she knows she should soon. She’s left Five alone all day.

 _He’s an adult,_ she reminds herself. It doesn’t help. Adult or not, she feels uneasy about it. They’re still trying to figure each other out, and she's already come home to unpleasant surprises a couple of times just in the week he's been with her.

“I don’t have an attic,” Vanya points out, “and you’ve never read _Jane Eyre.”_

Klaus shrugs, unapologetic. “You do have a tiny madman locked in your apartment.”

“He’s not locked in,” Vanya snaps. “I’d never lock anyone up.”

Klaus’s expression softens. “I know. But seriously, has he left your apartment since he moved in?”

“You know he has,” Vanya says. “He’s been to dinner.”

“Yeah, but I mean...someplace other than the Academy—sorry, we’re calling it the _mansion_ now. He literally blinked you both there, that doesn’t count. He didn’t even go buy his own clothes! Have you brought him down here? It’s practically Griddy’s! It’ll be familiar!”

“It’s not ‘practically Griddy’s’,” Vanya says. “This is a diner, not a donut place.”

“You’re just grasping at haystacks now, aren’t you?” Klaus asks with a theatrical sigh, and Vanya snorts.

“Tell me you know you’re mixing metaphors.”

Klaus grins.

+

There’s no fanfare when Five moves in with Vanya. They barely even talk it over. It feels practical. With his body how it is, it’s not like he can find his own place, and it’s better for him to live with someone who can (marginally) function in the real world anyway.

So when Vanya goes back home, he follows, because Vanya's his favorite. She makes him a bed on the couch in her living room again, and this time he doesn’t disappear on her.

Vanya still goes into the living room every night just to make sure he's there.

(Once she was a kid walking around a huge, cold house looking for her brother, turning on lights to lead him home, making sandwiches just in case he was hungry when he came back.

It took a year for Vanya to stop making him sandwiches, but it was much longer before she stopped wandering the halls looking for him and finally stopped thinking he’d come back. It was why she couldn’t figure out how to react when he did. Little Number Five, not so little anymore in the ways that mattered most.)

Five still talks with his whole body. He’s still blunt and not very bothered by other people’s feelings. He’s still a perfectionist. He still wants answers to any possible question that comes to his mind. He still has an understated but identifiable flair for drama. He’s still so strong-willed that sometimes it seems like an exercise in failure to argue with him. He’s still capable of a single-minded focus that’s almost scary. He still likes listening to her play the violin. Vanya’s still his favorite.

Vanya still walks around her home looking for him, but now she can find him.

When she goes into the living room (on the nights he doesn’t lead her there with his screaming) and sees him sleeping or scribbling in one of his notebooks or, on a bad night, the wall behind the couch, or, on a worse night, not doing anything at all, just sitting in the armchair staring—she can finally be assured that she’s found him. He’s right there, in body.

Vanya doesn’t think he’s ever really acknowledged her at night. Sometimes he looks at her, but he doesn’t seem to see her. His eyes skim over her form and Vanya gets the uncomfortable feeling that she’s not real to him in those moments.

Maybe nothing’s real to him in those moments except a past that they can’t even begin to share.

In his talkative moments, he might tell her something about the apocalypse or the Commission, offering random anecdotes that explain a lot and don’t explain anything. He doesn't tend to say how he feels about them.

That’s another thing that hasn’t changed about Five. He always thought he was too good for feelings, and definitely too good to need help. To him, needing help is for other people. Five has never been like other people, and he’s always felt that keenly.

It’s just that when they were kids, Five always felt present, solid, the one person who would listen to Vanya. He was familiar, and if he ignored her it never felt like it was because he wasn’t hearing her at all or because he was locked in his own head in a tortured past or a threatening future. Of course it didn’t feel that way. They hadn’t lived long enough for it to feel that way. Hadn’t lived apart long enough for it to feel that way.

Back then, they knew each other well enough that Vanya could glean how Five felt from his tone of voice and the way he moved his body. That’s a lot harder now.

Sometimes she isn't sure if they're even speaking the same language anymore.

+

It’s eight in the morning on Vanya’s day off—well, she doesn’t have rehearsal and she isn’t teaching any lessons, at least—and four hours ago she woke up from a dream she forgot the second her eyes opened. There were tears on her face.

(She never remembers her dreams. It’s probably the only nice thing her brain does for her.)

She couldn’t get back to sleep. After getting bored of staring at the ceiling and watching the Weather Channel on the TV in her room and planning lessons, she went to the kitchen, took down the grocery list on the fridge, replaced it with a note saying she was going out, and finally freed herself of her apartment. It’s harder than ever to stay cooped up, even with someone else living with her. Maybe especially with someone else living with her.

The grocery list, her excuse to leave the fucking apartment—not a bad excuse either, they’ve run out of enough that going to the store is warranted—is crumpled in her jacket pocket, and she clutches it as she makes her way to the store, hands deep in her pockets and shoulders hunched.

Vanya stares down at the cracked concrete of the sidewalk. Her scarf is coming loose, and she takes the grocery list free hand out of the pocket of her jacket to adjust it. It’s a sparkly baby blue that looks weird paired with her black pleather coat and black jeans. Klaus left it at her place, and it was all she could dig up when she was heading out.

Vanya darts a look upwards. Rolling clouds turn the sky a shining pearl white. The Weather Channel was right; it’s going to snow in late April. On and off for a few days, the newscaster said. It’ll stick and everything. It feels like a pretty sudden change after last week, which was warm, but Vanya doesn’t mind. She’s always liked the snow, and she likes the way the cold nips at her too, the way it makes her cheeks burn and her fingers start to go numb.

It feels more potent than it ever has before. Sharper. So does everything else, from her own violin music to another person’s skin against hers. There’s a clarity to the world she lives in now, and everything feels different.

She’s different.

It scares her sometimes, especially the way that every sound around her sometimes gets charged with power depending on her mood. It scares her enough that she’s considered going back on her pills, but the idea of taking them makes her sick, so she controls herself instead. She’s learning how to control herself, control her powers, even embrace them. They’re pretty cool.

Pretty cool. No, they’re pretty dangerous. She’s pretty dangerous. She almost killed Allison. Allison, her sister who was as much a victim as Vanya was before Vanya victimized her again. Her sister, who still can’t talk. When Vanya was in that horrible fucking soundproof cell, she could feel the ground moving under her, the walls shaking, and she thinks that if Luther hadn’t ended up finally listening to the others and tearing the thing open, she would’ve brought the whole mansion down.

She was angry enough, devastated enough, scared enough, that she barely had to think before nearly choking Luther to death. At least she didn’t manage it, but she was already a bona fide murderer by then anyway.

Vanya swallows hard and then takes a deep breath as she walks through the automatic doors of the store. She doesn’t have time to obsess over hurting her family, over the forgivable and unforgivable, over all the things she is capable of destroying and all the things she’s already destroyed.

She has to buy bread and cereal and tortillas and supplements. She has to keep it together, because if she ends up running away, it won’t just be her going hungry.

It’s not just her anymore.

(Vanya used to get a weird kind of déjà vu when she saw a boy who looked like Five. She’d look at some random kid and recognize him, think, _oh, there you are,_ before realizing that wait, of course it wasn’t Five. It was never him, because even if she saw him again he’d look older, not forever thirteen.

She never stopped seeing him, and now he’s back. He’s back, and she's trying to see him again. She’s just…she’s trying.)

Vanya takes out her grocery list and smooths it out. She already knows what she’s going to get—her memory’s sharper than ever now that she’s not doped up—but she’s used to it. Grocery lists were the kinds of things normal people wrote out. She lets out a whisper of a laugh when she notices, written at the bottom of the piece of paper in Five’s handwriting, _COFFEE._ It was already on the list.

Vanya considers, for a moment, not getting it and telling Five that if he wants coffee, he has to go out with her to buy it, leave the apartment for once to go somewhere that isn’t the mansion, but she puts the thought away, just like she always does. She doesn’t want to push. It’s only been, what, two weeks since he moved in, only about a month since he even got back, and she thinks she should probably do things at his own pace, whatever that is now.

(Five used to do everything at breakneck speed, but he’s slowed down. Vanya’s pretty sure he doesn’t like it but doesn’t know what to do about it. She can relate.)

Vanya buys coffee.

She doesn’t get many groceries, but lugging them home is still a pain. She could’ve called a cab, but she wasn’t interested in dealing with another human being asking her where she’s headed and how she’s doing and if she has any kids. Not interested in being locked up in a small space either. Vanya’s always preferred walking.

Maybe next time she’ll ask Luther to help her out. He’s not much better about leaving his house than Five is about leaving hers, but Vanya’s pretty sure he’ll be willing to go grocery shopping with her. For her.

Vanya and her siblings are getting to know each other again, or maybe they’re just getting to know each other.

Things are better now, and they’ll keep getting better. Vanya dwells on that a lot. She’s not sure if she’s happier than she’s ever been, but she thinks she should be. It’s just that there’s a lot going on (she’s not lying; being First Chair is almost overwhelming, not to mention her teaching) and she’s tired.

She has to set the groceries down to open the door, fumbling with her keys. She’s glad no one leaves their apartment while she’s going into hers. She opens the door and pushes her way inside, staying as quiet as possible just in case Five is still asleep by some miracle.

He’s not. He’s sitting curled up in the armchair in her living room, which is pretty much his armchair by now, writing in a notebook. It’s not the same one he was using yesterday. There’s an entire pile of notebooks next to the couch, on top of the big plastic container where they keep his clothes. Vanya’s snuck looks at his notebooks before, but they’re mostly equations and scribbled words that she doesn’t look at too closely because she feels bad for snooping. At least he’s not writing on the walls anymore. Most of the time.

“Hello,” he mutters, and Vanya gives him an attempt at a smile, relieved at the acknowledgement, though he doesn’t look at her.

“Hey,” she says. “I went grocery shopping. I got bread and cereal.”

“Coffee?” Five asks, still scribbling.

“How could I forget?”

Five nods. He makes a sharp movement with his hand that Vanya’s pretty sure is him crossing something out, scowling, and doesn't say anything else. It depends on the day or hour or second or maybe the alignment of the fucking planets whether Five will be willing to have a full conversation with Vanya--the kind they used to have when they were younger, the kind she always remembered fondly after he left--or not.

Vanya gets the feeling that the planets aren't in her favor today, and doesn’t ask for help putting away the groceries.

+

She gets home from a long rehearsal to find Five drinking straight from a bottle of tequila—fuck knows how he got it—with his legs thrown over the arm of his chair. His hair is a mess, his shirt is stained, and he’s definitely drunk. Impressively drunk, if the small amount of cheap tequila left in the bottle he’s now clutching against his stomach as he stares at the ceiling is anything to go by.

Vanya sighs, but she can’t really blame him. He had a nightmare the other night, and he hadn’t for a week, and he’s frustrated. Vanya’s frustrated too. She just wants him to be okay, and Five just wants to be okay. She wishes that alcohol could actually make him okay, but he’s just going to end up with a hangover. Still. She's not going to judge.

Vanya walks over to Five and puts a hand on his shoulder. He doesn’t usually let her touch him, but he does when he’s drunk out of his mind. “Hey,” she says.

“Hey,” he echoes, craning his head to look at her. “Vanya,” he says. He sounds pleased. “I missed you.”

Vanya swallows hard. “I missed you too, Five,” she tells him as she pries the bottle from his hands. He frowns, but doesn’t fight her. She looks at the bottle and winces. She’s glad she got back when she did. They’ve managed to avoid alcohol poisoning so far, and she’s hoping to keep up the good work. She sets the bottle down next to the armchair and shakes one of his shoulders. “Get up, Five, it’s time to go to bed.”

He nods slowly and gets himself out of the armchair. She grabs his arm to steady him when he sways on his feet, helps him to the couch, and sits him down. She says, “I’ll get you some water, okay?”

Five looks at her, looks past her, and says, “Sure.”

When she comes back with the water, he’s still sitting there, staring dreamily beyond the far wall. He doesn’t acknowledge her, murmuring something under his breath that she can’t make out. She hates it when he talks to himself. She’d never tell him that, obviously, but she does. She wonders if he’s more honest with the voices he hears and the visions he sees.

(She wonders how much of any given moment is actually real to him, if he’s going to remember what they spoke about tomorrow, if he’s even there at all.)

“Hey,” she says, holding the glass of water out. “Drink it, okay?”

Five looks at her with vague recognition and nods. Outside, the sun is going down. He takes the glass of water and drinks until it’s empty. He makes no move to put the cup down, so Vanya takes it from his hand and goes to set it on the coffee table that’s on the other side of the living room now so that Five won’t hurt himself banging against it if he ends up falling out of bed during a nightmare.

When Vanya turns back to him, he’s sprawled out on the couch, already mostly asleep, eyes half-lidded.

Vanya is flooded with a strange, numb longing as she looks at the kid on the couch, the skinny boy sporting black sweatpants and a forest green t-shirt and a mess of dark brown hair and a serene thousand yard stare. She knows him, of course she knows him, that’s the same boy she used to sneak out of her room with, the same boy who listened to her speak and never seemed to even consider not considering her important, except he’s not a boy anymore. The person she’s thinking of is a thousand yards and forty-five years away.

Vanya’s throat feels tight and her eyes burn, but she doesn’t know if she actually feels sad. She just feels unsteady, confused, unsure, scattered, far away. She wonders if this is how Five feels most of the time. She picks up the blanket on the floor and sets it over him as he starts to drift away, and he actually lets her, curling into himself. Vanya thinks he seems almost content, almost relaxed, but his glazed eyes and mannequin half-smile betray him. He’s just drunk.

“Hey, Five,” Vanya whispers a moment before he falls asleep, and he blinks up at her slowly and raises his eyebrows.

“Shoot,” he slurs out, and then he smiles at what he must think was a joke.

Vanya smiles back, and asks, “What’s the opposite of déjà vu?”

“Jamais vu,” Five responds without missing a beat as his eyes close and Vanya lets her smile fall. “It’s French for ‘never seen’.”

The last word is barely out of his mouth before he’s drifted off, and Vanya kneels down next to him, the closest she’s been in a long time.

Tentatively, she smooths back his hair, and breathes evenly right along with him. It’s nearly an hour before she finally decides to go to sleep, but she’s almost out of the door before she turns back to look at him again. He looks peaceful, none of the usual worry lines he gets when he sleeps on his face, none of the tossing and turning. No wonder he drinks.

Vanya can’t bring herself to leave the room, because this is her brother and he’s right there and she can’t leave him alone. He’s spent too long alone.

There’s a thin futon in the corner of the living room for when Klaus comes to visit, and Vanya takes it, unfolds it, and curls up. She goes to sleep. The sound of Five’s breathing is her lullaby.

When she wakes up, she’s disoriented for a moment before she remembers last night and sits up, a blanket falling to her lap. She doesn’t remember getting a blanket. When she moves her hand, she nearly knocks over a cup of coffee that’s sitting next to her futon. She picks it up and takes a sip, smiling. There’s sugar and cream in it, exactly how she likes it.

She didn’t drink coffee when she was thirteen. She didn’t know he’d noticed how she took it now, didn’t think he was as observant of her as he used to be back when he knew all her favorite foods just like she knew his.

She hears someone shift behind her, and she turns to look at Five, who’s sitting in his armchair, reading a book. He looks pretty put together, considering the hangover he must have.

“Good morning,” he says in a mild voice. He looks at her, right at her, and his voice is soft when he says, “I made you coffee.”

Vanya smiles. “I noticed. Thank you.”

Five ducks his head in an awkward nod, and then he clears his throat and, looking down at his book again, says, “Thank you, Vanya. Really. I know you’re…I know. I’m.” He deflates a little, so uncharacteristic of the Five she used to know. He shrugs. “Like this. I’m like this.”

Vanya doesn’t know exactly how to respond, but she grasps for words anyway because she knows that she can’t not say anything, she knows that that would be a disaster. “It’s okay, Five. I’m just glad you’re here.”

Five clenches his jaw. He tilts his head a little, as if he’s listening to something. Vanya doesn’t try to listen too. She used to. She just waits now, hoping that he’ll keep talking, that he won’t shut down, that he won’t start talking to someone else instead. He shakes his head and looks at her again, eyes focused, and when he does, she doesn’t get a feeling of déjà vu or jamais vu. She just gets the feeling that her brother is talking to her, finally.

He says, “I’m trying.”

Vanya nods. “I know. It hasn’t been that long since it all ended, okay? We’re all trying to...we're all trying.”

Five looks down at his book, runs the pads of his fingers over one of the pages. “It ended,” he repeats, and then he shakes his head. “I was always working towards that. I wanted to stop the apocalypse, that was everything. That was my goal. That was my life’s work, and now…” He raises a hand, makes a vague, helpless gesture.

“You can find something else,” Vanya promises, grasping to say something, anything helpful. “The worst is over.”

“The worst is over,” Five says, “and there’s nothing left but the rest of my life.”

Vanya feels her heart crack. “It's going…”

Five cuts her off with a shake of his head. “Never mind,” he mutters. “I’m being silly. I’m reading. Please don’t bother me.”

Vanya knows she’s not going to get anything more from him today. She tells herself that this conversation was a success in spite of the swell of joy in her chest morphing into an aching disappointment.

Today she has lessons, and the parents of her students will ask how she’s doing, and she’ll swallow down the truth, which is that she’s doing her best and she doesn’t know if it’s enough, and she’ll say she’s fine.

She stands up, grabbing the mug. Very softly, she says, “Thank you for the coffee.”

+

One night, when they were six years old, it snowed.

Five snuck into Vanya’s room and asked if she wanted to look at the snow with him, and Vanya didn’t really care about the snow, she just cared that he asked her and not anyone else. They blinked up to the roof and Five told Vanya that snow was made from water vapor frozen around dirt in the air, so really snow was dirt, and no two snowflakes looked the same.

Vanya frowned and asked, “How do scientists know that?”

Five shrugged, “They researched.”

Vanya still felt skeptical, and she was always willing to ask Five questions. No one else, just him. “So they looked at every single snowflake ever and made sure that there aren’t any snowflake twins? Maybe there’s snowflake twins and they’ve just never seen them. Things don’t not exist just because no one’s seen them.”

Five furrowed his brow and for a moment Vanya thought he was going to give her some long-winded explanation as to why she was the stupidest person to ever be stupid, but then he said, “Good point.”

After that, she just leaned her head against his shoulder, and they watched the snow fall.

+

Vanya wakes up from a deep sleep, but when she turns her head to look at her digital clock, she sighs. Two in the morning, great. Makes for three whole entire hours of rest.

Time to check on Five, then. When she walks into the living room and looks at the couch, her heart stops, because he isn't there. Immediately, her mind starts playing through worst case scenarios. Maybe he teleported out. Shit, that would be a disaster. He hasn’t done that yet, and if he makes it a habit Vanya’s going to die. It's two in the morning, it's dark, and Five gets confused at night. It hasn’t been as bad lately—she thought it wasn’t as bad lately—but. Sometimes he gets confused at night.

Vanya looks out the window, and her heart clenches when she sees the snow. She gets dangerously close to hyperventilating and is nearly at the telephone to call the mansion and tell them that fuck, Five disappeared when she sees a bright yellow post-it on the couch.

She takes it and reads, _ON ROOF._

The roof seems like a terrible place for Five to be, but Vanya takes a deep breath and tells herself that if Five was willing to tell her where he was going, he's probably in his right mind. Or at least isn't off doing something really stupid.

Vanya’s not going back to sleep tonight anyway, so she throws a coat on and then, after a moment of hesitation, grabs another one just in case, and makes her way up to the roof.

As promised, Five is there, standing a respectable distance away from the edge, looking up at the sky. He’s rocking back and forth on his heels, but he pauses when she steps onto the roof. Lately he’s been sleeping through the night more often, and when he’s awake he’s started acknowledging her sometimes when she stops by.

Vanya kicks a rock just so that Five’s ridiculously sensitive hearing will pick it up, and his body tenses.

“Hey, Five,” she says, and he looks down, to the side, and up again, hunching in on himself and then correcting his posture. He looks a little more relaxed after, and Vanya takes a few steps closer, not sure what’s going on but feeling a spark of hope. Two months into his stay with her, maybe Five isn’t confused at all. Maybe he's fine. Maybe he went outside because he wanted to.

He’s noticed her, he hasn’t told her to go away, he’s not talking to himself, and she’s drawn towards him. He used to be a comforting presence to her. Maybe he still is. She hopes she’s a comforting presence for him too. Her chest aches.

Vanya doesn’t try to speak. Talking will just get between them. She can’t help but remember, with bittersweet fondness, that night years and years ago when Five teleported into her room just so they could watch the snow. She wonders if he’s thinking of that too. If he remembers. His memory isn’t what it used to be, but she hopes he remembers. She hopes that that’s what he’s thinking of.

Five’s shirt is black and long-sleeved, and Vanya knows it has “BETTER THAN NA” written on the front in glittery red letters, a relic from that one time that Klaus inexplicably decided to make merchandise for his addiction recovery group. Five’s wearing sweatpants and sneakers too, and it’s not a totally unreasonable ensemble, but he’s still going to catch his death out here. “I brought you a coat,” she says.

“The apocalypse is over,” is Five’s unrelated response, if it’s a response at all and not just a statement. He isn't whispering, but his voice is soft and his tone is mild, and Vanya doesn’t know what to expect. He stares up at the sky, watching the swirling snow come down.

“You’re right,” Vanya agrees, measuring her voice so she’s not talking to him like he’s a spooked animal as she walks up to stand just behind him in his shadow.

He may not have acknowledged her mention of the coat, but he's seriously still going to freeze if he stays out here for a long time like Vanya imagines he’s planning to, and of all the things Vanya can do for him, keeping him warm is an easy one. With only a little hesitation, hoping he doesn’t snap at her, she drapes the coat she brought over him. Five doesn’t respond when she does it, so she adjusts it herself, tucking it around his shoulders to keep it from slipping off.

She keeps her hands on his shoulders once she’s done, reluctant to pull away.

“It's over, and I’m still here,” Five tells her. He sounds dazed, but not disoriented.

“Yeah, you are,” Vanya agrees, and without thinking too much she leans in and puts her arms around his shoulders, hugging him from behind. He’s still not moving away, just looking up and considering the snowfall.

Vanya feels a warmth rise in her chest, love and relief at the same time, and without thinking she hugs him tighter, resting her chin on his shoulder. He doesn’t protest, and it feels like a minor miracle. He probably thinks she needs the contact more than he does, and she’ll let him.

“It’s over,” he says again, finally moving a little so that he can draw the coat closer to himself, clutching at the wool and brown pleather. That coat is big on Vanya, and it only fits Five a little better. Vanya adjusts her arms around him and her chin on his shoulder, tilting the angle of her head to see the snow more easily.

Five is quiet and still, but Vanya can feel his even breaths, the vitality of his presence in her arms, the way the tension in his body leaks away, and she feels genuinely at ease for the first time in a long time. It’s one step forward, two steps back. She’s ready for a step forward, and so is Five, and he’s letting her touch him and he’s not drunk and it's snowing and this is...

“I know this isn’t easy for you,” Vanya says. She knows, but she thinks that tomorrow she’s going to ask him to go grocery shopping with her, because he left the apartment and he’s not freaking out. He’s okay. And if he’s not okay tomorrow, they’ll deal with it.

It’s minutes before Five says anything, but he does. “You’re right. It’s not easy.”

He doesn’t expand on that thought, and Vanya doesn’t ask him to. She just breathes, and lets him breathe, and watches the snow.

“I’m really glad you’re here, Five,” Vanya whispers.

Without hesitation, Five responds, “So am I.”

**Author's Note:**

> Edit as of 6/8: I’m sorry I never got around to responding to comments; just know that I read every one and love every one!


End file.
